Supersipping in the superstate

Winegrowers of the world now have to bow to American taste

THE vocabulary of wine gushes with references to fruit, flowers and vegetables, but the French have added a new, implicitly disdainful adjective: Parkerisé. It means a wine designed to appeal to Robert Parker, described by Elin McCoy as the world's single most influential critic. His judgment, expressed through his newsletter, the Wine Advocate, can make or break a winemaker, and be the difference between profit and loss for those sad people who buy wine merely as an investment. As even the noblest domaines of Bordeaux and Burgundy have come to recognise, it is American taste, most notably Mr Parker's, that now rules the world of wine.

Is that such a bad thing? Only the most absurdly prejudiced Francophile would deny the excellence of many wines from California or Chile, Australia and New Zealand. It is almost 30 years since the “Paris tasting”, when top French critics in a blind-tasting shocked themselves by choosing a 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet over a 1970 Mouton-Rothschild and Haut-Brion (six of the 11 best-rated wines in the tasting were from California). Paul Lukacs's selection of 40 American wines can certainly hold its place against foreign competition.

Yet there is a difference, one that can perhaps be summed up as art versus science. The traditional winemakers of France—and, for that matter, other parts of the Old Continent—prize the terroir, that complex mix of soil, air, climate and so on that lends each wine its individual character. But the winemakers of America, often wealthy newcomers from the world of dotcom, have shown that a very good wine can be created by following a set of rules, from the time to pick the grapes to the right amount of micro-oxygenation (adding a touch of oxygen to soften the tannins). No wonder France's wine labels denote their place of origin; California's their choice of grapes.

Mr Parker's role in the argument is crucial. His judgment in the Wine Advocate comes not just in his tasting notes (a favourite adjective is “jammy”) but in the score, out of 100, that he gives each wine. Any wine will get 50 points just for “showing up”; another 5 are available for colour and appearance; 15 for the bouquet; 20 for flavour and finish; and 10 for overall quality and the ability to age well. Apply the formula to Bordeaux wines, supposed to improve with age, and any score above 90 will ensure a high price in what amounts to a futures market; anything less is a disaster—even though Mr Parker himself describes wines scoring in the 80s as “very good” and 75-79 as “above average”.

If the Parker rating is what counts, how do you score well? Ms McCoy, in her eminently readable book, writes: “As dozens of winemakers have told me, ‘If I want to make a 95 Parker wine, I know what I have to do.' ” Indeed so: thin the vine leaves to allow more sun to hit the grapes; reduce the number of grape clusters in order to concentrate the flavour in the ones remaining; harvest the grapes as late as possible; and use processes called cold maceration and malolactic fermentation to deepen the wine's colour and smooth out its tannins. In other words, arrive at the full-bodied, strong and rich wines typical of California. If you need help, you can hire Michel Rolland, a peripatetic winemaker and a friend of Mr Parker's. Or in California you can contact Leo McCloskey, whose Enologix company claims to have cracked the scientific formula for a 90+ wine.

Not even his fiercest rivals would dispute Mr Parker's particular genius: his ability to keep a judicious and rigorously independent head while tasting some 10,000 of the world's wines a year is truly remarkable (and was personally rewarded by President Jacques Chirac with a légion d'honneur). And it would be churlish not to admire the rise to fame (and fortune) of a small-town American who, as a young lawyer, would search for interesting wines while most of his contemporaries were more inspired by Coca-Cola and cold beer.

Yet the notion of a precise score-card is hard for most connoisseurs to accept. Mr Lukacs rightly notes the “illusion of objectivity”, explaining that “it matters a great deal who is assigning the points—not only in terms of the critic's personal preferences but also in terms of context.” Thomas Pinney, in his magisterial work (a previous volume covered America's wine before prohibition), cannot even bear to mention Mr Parker and his Wine Advocate: “There is an obsession with prices...an obsession with ratings, a touching dependence on the judgments of the supposed wine experts, and an obsession with having only the best, accompanied by an anxious display of knowingness and a corresponding fear of revealing ignorance.”

Mr Pinney is right. Even though America is now the world's fourth-largest wine producer (after Italy, France and Spain), Americans tend to feel uncomfortable with wine. Puritan instincts live on: an 18-year-old can vote, marry or die in Iraq, but cannot legally drink a glass of wine.

Will America's attitude to wine change? Pessimists point to Prohibition as proof of an abiding fear of alcohol; optimists say its repeal, well described in Mr Pinney's elegant prose, is proof that fear has given way to realism. Meanwhile, all three of these books—Ms McCoy's impartial assessment of Mr Parker's taste and influence, Mr Pinney's encyclopedic study and Mr Lukacs's guide to America's best wines—should add new converts to the pleasures of the vine.